Eli Barrish
Bio
Litigator in Austin, TX. Stanford Law School '24. UT Austin '18.
Comments11
The aggregate portfolio of Open Phil and Good Ventures is quite bad for the world... I also genuinely think you are causing pretty huge harm for the world.
Can you elaborate on this? Your previous comments explain why you think OP's portfolio is suboptimal, but not why you think it is actively harmful. It sounds like you may have written about this elsewhere.
This comment overall isn't obviously immediately relevant
My experience of reading this thread is that it feels like I am missing essential context. Many of the comments seem to be responding to arguments made in previous, perhaps private, conversations. Your view that OP is harmful might not be immediately relevant here, but I think it would help me understand where you are coming from. My prior (which is in line with your prediction that the vast majority of readers would disagree with your comment) is that OP is very good.
It would not be hard to do, but I don't quite get the point. What's the case for giving pro bono legal counseling to ex-OAI employees? They have the resources to coordinate and hire their own lawyers. Plaintiff-side firms have probably already reached out to them because it's in the news. Is the idea that writing a public legal memo analyzing the contract in depth would generate EA-related goodwill among the ex-OAIs, who are likely to go on to work at other AI shops? I'm not sure if that really makes sense.
I forwarded your question to an EA-aligned Stanford Law School professor who has worked in the startup space. Here is what he said (tl;dr he thinks you should patent it):
[A] patent & startup is an excellent way to protect & scale the technology. If the tech is in the public domain, it might actually deter a larger company from developing/using it because they'll fear a competitor will use the tech and undercut their price.
The best path would likely be to patent it and then either license it to a large company or spin out a startup. If the PhD is a "scientist" type (and has no desire to be a businessperson / operator) then she might need to find co-founders to assist.
I'd be happy to pass along his contact info via DM if you want to discuss further (he is happy to chat with you). Congrats on the cool tech!
I'm skeptical that this would be cost-effective. Section 230 aside, it is incredibly expensive to litigate in the US. Even if you found a somewhat viable claim (which I'm not sure you would), you would be litigating opposite a company like Microsoft. It would most likely cost $ millions to find a good case and pursue it, and then it would be settled quietly. Legally speaking, you probably couldn't be forced to settle (though in some cases you could); practically speaking, it would be very hard if not impossible to pursue a case through trial, and you'd need a willing plaintiff. Settlement agreements often contain confidentiality clauses that would constrain the signaling value of your suit. Judgments would almost certainly be for money damages, not any type of injunctive relief.
All the big tech players have weathered high-profile, billion-dollar lawsuits. It is possible that you could scare some small AI startups with this strategy, but I'm not sure if the juice is worth the squeeze. Best case scenario, some companies might pivot away from mass market and towards a b2b model. I don't know if this would be good or bad for AI safety.
If you want to keep working on this, you might look to Legal Impact for Chickens as a model for EA impact litigation. Their situation is a bit different though, for reasons I can expand on later if I have time.
I'm a recent law school grad. Feel free to DM me if you're still feeling pessimistic about it and want to chat.